Stephen Bundy in the news:

Stephen Bundy, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said courts have upheld attorneys’ fees that are greater than the award the plaintiffs received, as in Lucas and Bradshaw’s case. “Sometimes courts have been prepared to justify those fee awards on the grounds that the prosecution of the case advanced an important public interest,” he said.

“Some of this is obviously wrong,” said Stephen Bundy, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. McCormick’s “out in the world trying to advance her interests and his own. That’s a basic impropriety, which is heightened by the fact he is a judge on the court she is before.”

“Though our first-time pass rates remain markedly higher than the overall pass rate for ABA-accredited law schools, we do not regard the 2007 results as acceptable,” Edley wrote in a memo to third-year students and LL.M.s on April 17. “We do not yet know whether those results reflect statistical variation or real changes in preparedness among our graduates.”

Howard Shelanksi noted that 82 percent is not bad compared with the overall pass rates for the California bar. But that’s little comfort to Boalt students, he added. “We want to push back up to our historic levels of bar-pass.”

“The bar is the mother of all closed-book in-class exams,” Bundy said. “I think the hiring of Kristen [Holmquist] provides a chance for us to look at the way these issues play out through the curriculum.”

“What you’re watching is a bit of a transition from a world in which class-action practice did have some disreputable aspects to a different model that’s much more responsible, publicly oriented and closely regulated,” said Stephen Bundy.

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